Furthermore, isolating the red letters apart from their narrative context breeds contempt for that context, particularly the hard parts of Scripture. This leaves believers with no adequate answer to the kinds of charges made increasingly by anti-theists. Thus when Richard Dawkins asserts in The God Delusion that the “God of the Old Testament” is “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully,” too many Christians are ill-equipped to respond.

Remember the old bumper sticker that proclaimed, “God says it. I believe it. That settles it.”? An updated version might read, “Jesus didn’t say it. I don’t believe it. That settles it.”

From Hollywood celebrities to famous pastors, Jesus’ silence is being cited as the final authority on issues ranging from homosexuality to masturbation to street evangelism. This negative hermeneutic is the logical extreme of Red Letter Christianity.

Red Letter Christians emphasize the words of Jesus printed in red in some modern versions of the Bible. The movement made its official entrance onto the evangelical platform nearly ten years ago, setting out “to take Jesus seriously by endeavoring to live out his radical, counter-cultural teachings as set forth in Scripture, and embracing the lifestyle prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount.”

Red Letter Christians claim, “You can only understand the rest of the Bible when you read it from the perspective provided by Christ.”

But practice can’t be separated from interpretation.

While the highest levels of biblical and literary hermeneutics seem to confound us, a basic and valid interpretive lens for reading the Bible can be as straightforward as approaching a great literary work. (Of course, as most college freshmen will tell you—and this English professor will confirm—skillful reading of literature doesn’t come naturally. It must be learned.)

The inspired Word of God, the Bible is also a literary work written with artistry, a narrative arc, and themes both major and minor. Just as there are valid and invalid approaches to readingHuckleberry Finn, there are right and wrong ways to read the Bible. As readers, whether our text is God-breathed or merely mortal, we must take into account genre, purpose, audience, structure, and point of view. We find meaning by understanding each passage within context of the whole.

Consider the problem of the reliability of the narrator. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth describes a reliable narrator as one who “speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not.” Literary history is filled with examples of unreliable narrators: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Holden Caulfield, Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, Huck Finn. Unreliable narrators can even be found in works of nonfiction: Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Lena Dunham.

A certain level of readerly maturity, skill, and critical distance is required to discern between a reliable narrator and an unreliable one. For example, when Huck Finn tells us that his conscience is troubled for treating Miss Watson “so mean” by assisting her runaway slave, recognizing the unreliability of Huck as a narrator is imperative to grasping the meaning of the text as a whole. On the other hand, when the narrator of A Tale of Two Cities tells us, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the skilled reader knows the narrative voice reflects the view of the implied author.

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